Tuesday, 28 July 2015

39th Entry - A Return

After another long pause, this time in China, work has recommenced.

Interesting how the atmosphere can so greatly affect your work flow. In April you worked with Castilene, and the room was so cold, your hands so cold, that you were forced to switch to the slightly softer and stickier Degas plastilene. Still, work was impossible without going for brisk walks or runs to try and warm your own body temperature so that your hands could work the clay.
In July, that same material was so soft that you had to ignore the reason for working with a hard clay to begin with.
By late July the temperature has started switching back and forth, quite ridiculously.

Between April and July you tried to simply sculpt new eyelids over the steel balls. You thought you could do this simply and quickly, but found that your hands were wandering into other areas and you were changing the entire structure of the face. To add the steel ball into the face, a hole is made, and the original eye lost forever. Creating a new eye in the place of the original is impossible, and hence, a differently positioned eye will lead to repositioning of the mouth, the brow, the jaw, and wherever else your eye may fall.
You felt you might as well improve the face, but found you were only losing what you'd had, and on the week of your birthday you decided to stop. This all was senseless. You needed to find a way to get a mould out of the plaster versions from March of 2013. By now, these had long been the characters. They had traveled with you in a small tin box to Canada, and again a year later to China. The technicality of getting a hard mould from a hard object, or a soft mould that would not impede the silicone from curing, had dissuaded you from contemplating this in the past. And hence these many weeks, over the years, of battling with materials and your own inability to repeat your own creation.

The strange slipping away, and regrasping, and slipping further away of a face

In late June, after two weeks of traveling in Portugal, what had always seemed instinctively right, became necessary and a reality. You childhood bedroom became your studio.
The move took two weeks.